


Voodoo Games

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Blood Magic, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, For the Avengers movie anyway, Gen, Post-Canon, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-21
Updated: 2016-04-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 14:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6614809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had been on the run for two days now, and she was starting to think it was some kind of sick game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Voodoo Games

Natasha leaned against the wall, eyes closed and head tilted back. The warehouse had been run down and empty, and she had randomly chosen it from out of the collection of run down warehouses near the docks. She breathed as silently as she could, willing her heart to slow. Her safe houses weren't safe, and there was no one she was willing to put into harm's way to hide her for the moment. She had been on the run for two days now, and she was starting to think it was some kind of sick game.

Once she was calm and collected, she took stock of the situation. Other than the weapons she had on her, hidden beneath her ordinary jeans, jacket and boots, she had only herself. There was a fake ID in her pocket, not that it would really matter, but it might get her _somewhere_ if she was able to do more than hide. She had no money and no supplies, but that hadn't ever been a factor to worry about before. She could tap into some old resources if she had to, could sneak into a safe house to snag a change of clothes or dried food if she came up empty otherwise. It wasn't the first time she had been out in the cold, and likely wouldn't be the last. Natasha had known it was a possibility when she had first started following the whispers of a new intelligence network operating counter to SHIELD; with the World Council following Fury's steps closely, she had been the best choice because the Council had _never_ trusted that she had shifted her allegiance to him. They constantly watched her, sure she was playing him as a double agent for some enemy country, if not Russia.

It hurt, far more than she wanted to admit, but was the price she paid for being the off book hands that Fury needed her to be.

This place offered no true shelter, and there was no space that she could hide in and get some rest. Someone had known she was going to show up at the meet two days prior, and it had been a trap. The most she had been able to do was send out the "FUBAR – stay silent" signal to Clint and Fury, then she had gone to ground. Black hair, ordinary clothes, off the radio and any online networks, she should be able to come up again in a few more days if she dodged whoever had tried to put out the hit on her.

She started at the creaking sound. She had dozed off, which was unspeakably sloppy on her part and indicative of how exhausted she really was. In the two days since the trap, she had been fighting goons in black and gray fencing masks that didn't even say who they were working for, and moving constantly to avoid being trapped again. There had been no sleep, barely any food or water, and she was rapidly running on empty.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," came a familiar sing-song voice.

Loki was supposed to be imprisoned on Asgard. He wasn't supposed to be on Earth, apparently hunting her down.

Dammit. That meant he was _pissed_ about her tricking him on the helicarrier, and this was all about revenge. The bastard had smoked her out, using her loyalty to SHIELD against her, and she had fallen for it.

No use being angry about that now. It was done, and anger would only make her sloppy.

"Come, little spider," Loki purred, stepping into the open area of the warehouse. He had some kind of stone in his palm, which he held in front of him. Natasha could see that something like a ribbon was wrapped around it, and after a moment realized that the ribbon was the same color as her hair, before she had dyed it black.

Using the stone as a dowsing rod, Loki soon faced her direction. His lips stretched back in a wicked, cruel smile. He flicked the fingers of his other hand, and the shadows parted in her hiding place. The smile broadened, sending a shiver of fear down her spine. "There you are," he purred, menace clear in his tone.

Just when Natasha was about to slip into the remaining shadows and run, she felt pressure pushing down on her chest. Glancing back at Loki from the exit she had been about to take, she could see his fist closed tightly around the stone and ribbon. His menacing grin was still fixed in place as he came closer, and she could see that it wasn't quite ribbon around the stone, but a lock of her actual hair.

"You recognize it, of course," he said pleasantly, waving the stone and her hair. Her body shifted and moved as he moved the stone. "Very careful about not leaving part of yourself behind, which is wise. So of course, the manufactured minions had to take it from you."

The hair pulling and stab wounds during her fight made sense. Though she couldn't move her body, her mind was still under her own control. She could speak if she wanted to. He could control her physical body, but not her spirit.

She knew full well that could be bad enough in his state of mind.

"What do you want?" Natasha asked, voice even and bland. Any fear she felt was carefully tamped down and locked tight inside of her. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of her terror.

Loki lifted the stone and she was dragged upward to her feet. Her body was suspended an inch above the ground, held in place by sympathetic magic.

"What would it take to make you come undone, little spider?" he asked in a conversational tone, as if he wasn't threatening her. "What do you actually fear? The threat of death at your friend's hand isn't enough to stop you. Torture and intimate perversions hold no sway, I can see that. How best to take you apart?"

"Why would you care?" she asked, unable to shrug at him. "I'm just a pathetic human, right?"

"Precisely!" he snarled, spittle flying from his lips as they pulled back to bare his teeth. His eyes were alight with his rage, and she would have actually shrunk back from him if she could.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Find out how to take you apart," he replied, barely able to contain his rage. His grip tightened on the hair-wrapped stone, and she could feel the breath being forced out of her lungs. A trilling note from his lips kept the stone suspended in air, pressure maintained on her body.

He might not have thought torture would break her, but apparently it wasn't stopping him from giving it a good try.

There were knives in his armor, little hidden ones that looked to be nothing more decorative accents on the leather. They were sharp ones, flicking her clothes and weapons apart with barely a twitch of his wrist. She didn't say a thing as he cut them apart, broke her knives to splinters and slashed her garrote to confetti. His movements were jerky, far from controlled, and only hinted at the sheer power his rage could give him.

The chill air still caused gooseflesh, magic or no magic, and he paused for a moment to examine her like a specimen in a jar. Loki pushed the tip of one broken blade against her breast, breaking the skin and sliding it between layers. Her nostrils flared from the pain, but she had been expecting him to do something terrible.

"Your archer said that you had been trained by people that considered you less than human, more like a tool than a person."

When she didn't reply, he pushed the blade further into her, a swift movement she hadn't prepared for. Natasha hissed, eyes squeezing for a moment as she tried not to scream. It hurt to breathe, and she had to wonder if he had laced the steel with magic.

"Is that how you see yourself, then?" he asked. "A monster? A creature for others to use?"

She'd been trained and broken and retrained by better. Meeting his gaze, she offered him a serene smile. "I am made of marble."

Rage rippled across his features; it wasn't the response he had wanted or expected. A blast of magic threw her across the empty space, and the stone hovering in midair jerked as well. The fall pushed the fractured blade further into her chest, but she found she could move her arms a little bit; perhaps the hair around the stone had loosened. Ignoring the pain as best as she could, she worked the blade free of her chest and clutched it in her palm, pretending to catch her breath and heave. Loki's footsteps rang in the empty space, a hollow sound that no doubt was meant to intimidate her.

Natasha fully expected to die tonight, but she wasn't going to die afraid.

He was close, but not close enough for a broken piece of knife to do him enough damage. She let him come in closer, standing over her sprawled naked body, likely gloating. Tilting her head a little, she let the black hair fall over her face, partially shielding her expression from his view. She stayed sprawled, wanting him to think her weak.

"Marble doesn't bleed," he sneered.

There was no reply to that, not when he didn't understand the reference in the first place. She had no intention of letting him understand, and merely shifted herself slightly, as if her original position was so awkward and painful. He laughed at her, and she refrained from smiling at how he underestimated her again.

"Maybe not," she said slowly, inching forward. His leather armor was treated in some way that no doubt made it tougher than average hide, and it seemed thick and sturdy. Beneath the long overtunic and vests, however, his trousers seemed to be made of ordinary woven fabric resembling cotton. Not even the ruggedness of denim, though Loki probably wouldn't have thought anyone on the ground could be a threat to him.

"You are not made of stone."

"No," she said, still inching forward. "And neither are you."

Before he could react with a spell or kicking at her, she lunged upward, blade in hand. It raked down his inner thigh, sinking at least an inch deep as she dragged it down toward his knee. Loki howled and there was the warm gush of blood over her hand, so she knew that he was truly wounded. It wasn't a ploy to lull her, she was actually doing harm.

Magic yanked her from him and suspended her in midair again. Her toes wiggled uselessly six inches above the cement floor. She had scrapes on her forearms and elbows, her left breast was smeared with her own blood, and her left hand was slick from Loki's blood, the broken blade still caught in her tight fist.

Loki glared at her, eyes practically glowing with his hatred. His lips moved, a singsong kind of rhythmic pattern of nonsense syllables as he brought his left hand to cover the bleeding on the inside of his right thigh. The blood had already splattered a bit on the cement floor beneath him, but it no longer poured out.

"Not gloating?" he asked her when the bleeding finally stopped.

Natasha didn't know why he didn't just slit her throat right there and then. "Not my style," she replied, knowing the indifferent response would just anger him.

It did, and he brought one of his knives to her throat. "I could kill you."

"Yes, you could."

"But you don't fear death."

"So you've said."

He drew the knife from her throat and down to the valley beneath her breasts. "I could cut you apart. Take away all that makes you a woman."

"Go ahead and try."

Loki frowned, then brought the tip of the knife to a spot above her pubic bone. "You doubt my ability to harm you? Think I will spare you just because you're female?"

"No," she said quietly. "I think you'll kill me. I think you'll do whatever you need to do in your attempt to break me. But it won't work. I'll die, and you won't have broken me."

"Don't be so sure, little spider."

He turned to the stone floating in the air, and took the knife to one of the strands of hair. That was odd; didn't he need them there to maintain the sympathetic magic?

As the knife sliced the hair in two, a long gouge appeared on her body, going from her left knee up to her belly button. It went deep, yet avoided the femoral artery. Blood spilled down to the floor in a cascade, and it happened so fast Natasha didn't even feel the pain.

That came later, a stinging fire that nearly made her lose bladder control. _It's a test,_ she told herself, falling into the same mindset she used to have as a child in the Red Room. _It's all a test. I cannot fail. I never fail._

She watched Loki make some complicated hand gestures, and the blood started rising from the cement, looking like candle wax falling in reverse. It started shifting around into the shape of some kind of arcane symbol she couldn't recognize, shimmering as it hovered in the air. At Loki's sudden pushing hand movement, the blood pushed forward into her body, searing the symbol into her chest, right over her sternum.

Natasha howled as it burned into her, the stench of burning flesh and bone rising up to her nostrils. She felt weak, and knew that magic was the only thing keeping her upright.

"Maybe I can't hurt you enough," Loki purred, suddenly standing behind her suspended body, lips next to her ear, "but I can make you hurt yourself."

Sympathetic magic. Natasha really hated magic.

The slice into her thigh was still open, but no longer bled. That had to be magic. Had she passed out from the pain of the brand being pressed into her?

Another slice of a hair on the stone, and she could feel the tendons in her wrists being pulled out of her arms and through her skin. The pain was terrible, more horrible than anything the Red Room had done to her, and she couldn't stop herself from choking out a sob. The magic keeping her suspended shifted, and now her weight was being held up by the tendons.

"I can hurt you," Loki said, an eerie calm settling over his voice. He circled her body, and she could see that he appeared serene. "I will have you beg me to stop."

Natasha mirrored his smile. "Let's see what you can really do."

He hadn't expected that, and his expression changed into a mixture of disbelief, dismay and wrath. He wanted her cowed and humbled, begging for his mercy. She knew he didn't have any, not for creatures he thought beneath him, and had no intention of fueling his ego.

She could endure the knife cutting into her, scraping the skin from muscle, scoring against bone. The knife in front of her eyes didn't even make her blink; he wouldn't take an eye, not when that would mean she couldn't see what would happen next. Sometimes she screamed, when she couldn't quite stop herself, high and shrill and wordless, screeches of pain that seemed to be wrenched out of her and beyond her control.

Loki swam into her bleary vision as she struggled to take in a breath. One of his spells with the hair around the stone had broken three of her ribs with one slice of his knife. She almost wished she knew magic with that one, because that would have been a handy trick to have in the field, if she was still doing this kind of intimidation.

"You can't die until I tell you to," Loki said, tapping the brand on her chest. "This goes on until you beg me to stop, and you won't ever die from it, no matter what I do."

"I hope you don't tire easily," she rasped in reply.

"You don't fear death, you don't fear pain."

"No," she agreed, voice raw from her screams.

His stare made her skin crawl. "Everyone fears something," he said finally. "I'll find out what you fear. I thought I knew, but this isn't it."

There was no need to answer, not when her silence did it for her.

The flat of his knife rested against her cheek. He suddenly smiled, and it was the kind of smile that made her skin crawl and her spine itch. It didn't promise good things, and she didn't know how much more of the physical torture she could take.

"I can make you love me," he said proudly. "Take the _seidr_ and warp your mind. That will hurt you. Change who you are, change how you feel, make you mine... Oh yes," he said in the face of her sullen silence. "This will hurt you. It will hurt more than breaking your bones or stripping the flesh from your body will."

"I suppose we'll find out if you're capable of doing such a thing."

Loki laughed, and turned toward the stone floating in the air. His knife was pulled from her cheek and then scored across five strands in the center of the remaining ribbon tied around the stone. It felt like fire within her broken ribs, a searing heat inside of her lungs that threatened to burn her from the inside out. She couldn't draw in breath, couldn't keep her body from shaking as if she was caught in the throes of a seizure.

Natasha fell to the ground as the magic holding her tendons in the air dissipated. It was a painful sprawl, her right leg breaking on impact. The pain was another exquisite note in the symphony of agony that he had her in, and she could feel her mind retreat further into herself.

The sing-song chanting he had done earlier was back, different syllables and a different rhythm, but still unrecognizable to her ears.

Something shifted inside her body, something sharp and awful, a crawling sensation beneath her skin, something she wanted to _get out,_ but wasn't able to because her hands no longer worked. Her skin scraped across the concrete, and smears of her blood on the floor looked like a grotesque form of modern art.

He frowned and stopped chanting. "What are you?" she dimly heard him ask.

She was choking on her own blood, but wouldn't have answered anyway. The burn inside her body was unbearable, making it impossible to speak.

Surprisingly, Loki knelt beside her, frowning. "This wasn't supposed to happen."

Words wouldn't form, even if she was capable of speaking. Something had happened to her mouth, her tongue was thick and ungainly, not following her directions. She shook, spasms rocking her across the concrete, the symbol seared into her chest burning white hot.

"This isn't what the spell is supposed to do."

The stone was glowing as brilliant as burning magnesium. The remaining hair wrapped around it was shriveling, as if singeing from heat.

"No," Loki said in horror, shaking his head and backing up. "That wasn't supposed to happen. It's not what that spell does!"

Her chest was starting to glow as brilliant white as the stone, and it felt as if her body was changing shape, as if the broken bones were trying to shift and reset themselves, the broken skin starting to knit back together, the blood flowing backward into her wounds. The burn was still maddening and constant, obliterating everything else.

Consciousness blessedly faded, and the last thing Natasha saw was Loki's frightened face.

_I win._

***

Natasha came to in the helicarrier medbay, IV's hooked up to her arm and the lights in the room dim. Monitors were all silent, and she was in a thin hospital gown beneath a standard issue hospital sheet and blanket. Clint was asleep in a chair at the foot of her bed, his head on part of the bed not far from her feet.

As far as she could tell, her body was healed and looked just the way it should have.

"Hey," she croaked, which startled Clint awake. "What happened?"

"I guess we were hoping you could tell us," he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. "It took us a while to find you, since you're pretty good at not being found. But there was a report of a body found in a warehouse that looked like it was your kind of hiding place, so I went to look. Jesus," he said, shaking his head as he recalled the grotesque scene he had walked in on. "Blood everywhere, bone shards, your weapons all broken, clothes cut to ribbons, and then there you were in the center of it all."

"Loki came after me," she told him, voice still hoarse and raw. "Tortured me."

"What? Why?"

"Mad at me," she sighed, sinking a bit into her pillow. "For fucking with his head before."

Clint clasped her hand tightly. "Well, he's gone now, and you're fine. Techs said it was exhaustion and dehydration, so they hooked you up to that thing," he added, nodding at the IV on the pole. It looked to be a standard bag of lactated ringer's solution, so it all seemed to be on the level. Something itched along her spine, like something she had forgotten, but she couldn't place what it was. "We've got you now, and you're going to be okay."

She nodded and gave his hand a squeeze. "Everything heals eventually."

He squeezed her hand back. "Just sleep. I'll be here when you wake up."

Natasha closed her eyes to do just that, missing the way that Clint's lips stretched into a rictus of a smile, mirroring the worst of Loki's sadistic grins.

The End


End file.
